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Teorin would never tell her that there was a tunnel. The realization filled him with a rage so intense it stole his breath.
He could still feel her weight in his arms.
Cold. Too cold. Her lips had already turned blue. He had watched life leave her. He knew the odds. He knew, but it did not matter.
Hope was all he had left.
The alternative would destroy him. He entered the children’s room.
Somehow Saurin, Cambra, and the attendants had transformed what had clearly been a cold, abandoned nursery into something else entirely. Two bassinets stood beside one another, surrounded by blankets and neatly folded clothes.
Warm clothes. Tiny cloaks he had brought in a trunk from their Rathmor rooms the other day. The ones Asharin had sewn herself.
She had been excited for winter because she thought they would finally fit. A queen of two realms, yet she had still sat by candlelight stitching every seam with her own hands.
His chest tightened.
Cambra stood beside the bassinets when he entered. Her eyes immediately found his.
Pity. Concern. She tried to hide both. He knew he looked terrible but he had long since stopped caring what anyone thought.
No one understood.
No one could. They thought he mourned a queen. They thought he mourned his wife. They were wrong.
Asharin had become the axis his entire world turned around. Every thought. Every plan. Every hope he had for the future began and ended with her.
Loving her had become as instinctive as breathing. Now every breath felt like something his body had to remember how to do.
All he wanted was to be wherever she was. Even if that meant six feet beneath the earth. But the children needed him. He owed her that much.
They slept peacefully in their bassinets, unaware that the world around them had collapsed.
Cambra cleared her throat carefully.
“Majesty.”
“Yes?”
“The children are growing.”
He nodded absently.
“They seem… unsatisfied with milk alone.”
Colsar frowned. “Then Fiorakis can have more of my blood.”
She hesitated. “No, Majesty. I believe they are ready for solid food.”
Everything inside him went still.
He closed his eyes. He remembered those days in the countryside earlier in the marriage. Asharin had laughed while they lay in bed. “If we have children one day,” he had told her, “they’ll sit with us. We’ll eat together every evening.”
She had smiled so brightly.
Now the children were finally old enough.
It was supposed to be the four of them.
